On the heels of a much-undeserved Best Picture nomination for “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” I began to wonder how it could’ve appealed to so many Academy voters. On paper, Stephen Daldry’s film is total Oscar bait, but in execution it feels more genuinely hurtful than exploitative, melodramatic and weepy.
Much of that has to do with “Extremely Loud’s” extremely unlikeable lead character, the 9-year-old Oskar Schell. Oskar is portrayed brilliantly by the first time actor Thomas Horn, who carries the film and has a strong assertion over this character’s mannerisms, but Oskar’s irritating characterization, either stemming from Jonathan Safran Foer’s popular novel of the same name, or from Eric Roth’s (“Forrest Gump,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”) screenplay, does the movie wrong.
Oskar sets out on a quest following the death of his father Thomas (Tom Hanks) during the 9/11 attacks, but practically no occasion could excuse Oskar’s pedantic and frankly rude behavior. He finds a key in his father’s closet with the label “Black” on an envelope, and believing it to be a final message from his father, visits every person in New York named Black.
He visits all sorts of people throughout New York, and catalogs them in a notebook complete with photos and personal details that no little boy should know. When he visits Abby Black (Viola Davis), a woman struggling with her marriage, he quizzes her on facts about elephants and tells her a postcard of an elephant crying is blatantly Photoshopped. Meanwhile, she’s sobbing on the stairs.
It’s like this with any person he speaks to, even to his dad, who seems to be the only person to like and understand his quirks. He’s an incessant chatterbox of facts and figures who behaves more oddly than the Rain Man, and Daldry and Roth treat him like a quirky kid who for no reason carries around a tambourine and doesn’t take public transportation.
More accurately, Oskar is a plot device. The meaningless wave of numbers he recites over the deaths of all those lost in 9/11 and all those affected by it provide less clarity about New York and serve only to hurt more. There’s no reason for him to know any of it, nor should he have the photographic memory that serves only to provide a cloying tapestry of New York’s many citizens.
There’s a scene where Oskar is seen violently pinching his own body until he scars. It made me realize that a movie like “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” aims to exact pain on you. It does little to provide sadness or comfort and insists on attacking you with more hurtful facts about how Thomas’s missing body at Ground Zero has likely become fused with “dog feces,” as young Oskar puts it.
It’s a real sour feeling, one that only feels phonier when the movie starts getting cute. The legendary Max von Sydow plays The Renter, a character who for his own loosely developed reasons does not speak. He must carry with him an obscene amount of paper, as he encourages Oskar’s reckless behavior on the streets of New York. In fact, The Renter puts him through puzzling hell.
Thus it’s amazing to me that Academy voters not only like this film but also believe it to be the best film of the year. The film is however terrifically acted and well made. “Extremely Loud” is not a dark film, but its loaded with grays and blues in the color pallet. Rightly so, Oskar’s bright orange winter coat sticks out like a sore thumb. And there are enough even phony touching moments that I can see why a fan of the novel or someone close to the 9/11 tragedy could be won over by it.
And yet I can see just as many reasons why some critics have hated it. “Extremely Loud” is a frustrating and often exploitative film that is too full of semantics and quirks for its own good.
2 stars